NCAA Tournament Pools

Probably my second favorite sporting event starts tomorrow, the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.  This year I am going all out for the tournament, making the pilgrimage to Las Vegas for the first 4 days of the tournament.  Nowadays, everyone and their mother joins a pool.  But not all pools are created equal.  Most of the scoring settings for these pools don’t make sense, usually awarding too many points to the champion.  For example, the deault settings for both Yahoo and ESPN online brackets are (pts per game in each round): 1-2-4-8-16-32.

Under this system, guessing the champion is worth the same amount of points all 32 games of the first round.  How stupid is that?  What is even the point of picking the early round games if they have so little value.  For me, the best part of of the tournament is the first weekend, when games start at noon and don’t end until well past midnight.

Scoring systems should be weighted so that the early round games matter but, of course, the most points are given for the later games.  Here are a couple of progressive scoring systems that you should use to make the tournament pool more fun for everyone involved:

• 2-3-5-8-12-17
• 2-3-5-7-10-13

In addition to the typical bracket pool, there are many other pools to get down on some action for the NCAA tournament.  Here are a few of my favorites:

Daily Survivor – Pick a team to win every day of the tournament, can’t use any team more than once.

Seed Multiplier – Everyone in the pool picks a few teams (8 is a good number) and you get points for each win your teams get multiplied by their seed.  For example, if you pick a team seeded 4 and that team wins 3 games, you get 12 points for that team. If you pick a team seeded 1 and that team wins the championship (6 games), you get 6 points.

Team Performance Draft – This works best with 4-6 players.  You conduct a draft in which every team in the tournament gets picked and you get points based on each team’s performance.  You could use any number of scoring systems here but I like to go 1 point for each win (no matter the round).

Upset Pool – Everyone in the pool picks a few teams (6-10 will work) and you get points for every upset win.  The amount of points per win is determined by the upset.  For example, if you have a #10 seed and they beat #7 seed, you get 3 points (10-7), if a #8 seed beats a #1, you get 7 points, etc.  No points are awarded for wins against lower or equally seeded teams.